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Our next Shore Poets event will celebrate the last ever Mark Ogle Memorial Award (MOMA). Over twelve years, the award has commissioned work from some of the UK’s finest poets. Their poems have been gathered together in a pamphlet of all the stimulus and response poems. Watching Sunlight will be launched at the event, with copies available for a donation to a cancer charity.

Please join us on Saturday March 2nd, at the Cornerstone Centre, St John’s to hear the 2019 winner of the Mark Ogle Memorial Award: Jim McGonigal.

Jim will be joined on stage by previous winners: Anna Crowe, Vicki Feaver and Tom Pow. Angus Peter Campbell hopes to be with us, as does Meg Bateman, if the tide is right. Music will be provided by Shore Poets favourites, The Whole Shebang.

Mark was one of the earliest members of Shore Poets and one of the first to read at the group’s original venue, the Shore Gallery in Leith. His untimely death left his considerable poetic talent under-realised. His family decided to commission an annual award in which a poet, selected from the poets who had read at Shore Poets in the previous season, responded to one of Mark’s poems.

The Mark Ogle Memorial Award

JIM McGONIGAL

His poetry includes the prize-winning Passage/An Pasaíste (2004) and Cloud Pibroch (2010), both from Mariscat Press, and The Camphill Wren (2016) from Red Squirrel Press. His most recent work is Turning Over in a Strange Bed (Mariscat Press, 2017). His biography Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan (2012) won a Saltire Award, and he co-edited The Midnight Letterbox (Carcanet Press, 2016), a selection of the poet’s correspondence 1950–2010.

ANNA CROWE (winner 2013)

photo credit: Swithun Crowe

VICKI FEAVER (winner 2016)

TOM POW (winner 2012)

and hopefully…

ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL (inaugural winner 2008)

MEG BATEMAN (winner 2014)

MUSIC: THE WHOLE SHEBANG

The Whole Shebang is an Edinburgh-based collective, formed in 2011, who play good-time music, from show tunes and standards through blues, country and western to contemporary pop.

Our headline poets (no Shore Poet slot this month!) are Diana Hendry and Stewart Conn. Stewart Conn is one of Scotland’s leading poets. He was born in Glasgow but has lived in Edinburgh since 1977, where until 1992 he was head of radio drama for BBC Scotland. He was Edinburgh’s first Makar, or Poet Laureate, 2002-2005. His collection The Breakfast Room (2010) won the SMIT Book Awards Poetry Book of the Year. His most recent publication is Estuary (Mariscat Press 2012) and The Touch of Time: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming next month from Bloodaxe Books. He is Honorary President of Shore Poets.

Diana Hendry is an Honorary member of Shore Poets. She has published five collections of poems. Her latest, published last year, is The Seed-box Lantern: New & Selected Poems (Mariscat Press). She has also written over forty books for children, including Harvey Angell, which won a Whitbread Award, and recently The Seeing, which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize.
She has been Writer in Residence at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Edinburgh University. She lives in Edinburgh.

In a change to our original billing, our new poet will now be Lesley Glaister. Lesley is well-known for her fiction writing, but has only recently begun to compose poetry. The Shore Poets feel privileged to offer her a first-ever poetry reading slot in Edinburgh. We hope lots of you will come and help us to welcome her.
We hope that William Letford, originally billed as our new poet for the month, will join us sometime in the 2014/15 season.

This month we will also be presenting the Mark Ogle Memorial Award to Meg Bateman. Meg Bateman was born in 1959 in Edinburgh, studied Gaelic at the University of Aberdeen, and holds a PhD in Classical Gaelic religious poetry. Her first collection, Òrain Ghaoil / Amhráin Grá was published, with facing Irish translations by Alex Osborne, in 1990. In English, the title is “Love Songs.” Poems from Òrain Ghaoil were republished in Aotromachd agus Dàin Eile in 1997. Meg’s third collection, Soirbheas, was published in 2007. She lives in Skye with her son and teaches at the Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig.

We’ll have live music this month from Holm. Holm is Frank Glynn (violin/viola) and Stewart Veitch (electric guitar). They are an eclectic duo who play arrangements of music by Ron Sexsmith, Charlie Haden, Erik Satie, Manuel de Falla, Elvis Costello and Hildegard of Bingen among others, as well as their own compositions. They have a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/HolmDuo

As usual, we’ll also have our two wildcard slots up for grabs, where YOU can read alongside this amazing line-up! Just bring a poem you’d like to perform, put your name in the hat when you arrive at the door, and wait to see if your name is picked!

Our headline poet is Meg Bateman. Meg was born in 1959 in Edinburgh, studied Gaelic at the University of Aberdeen, and holds a PhD in Classical Gaelic religious poetry. Her first collection, Òrain Ghaoil / Amhráin Grá was published, with facing Irish translations by Alex Osborne, in 1990. In English, the title is “Love Songs.” Poems from Òrain Ghaoil were republished in Aotromachd agus Dàin Eile in 1997. Meg’s third collection, Soirbheas, was published in 2007. She lives in Skye with her son and teaches at the Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig.

There will also be poetry from our New Poet Iain Matheson, and the Shore Poet this month is Martin McIntyre.

A reminder: although there was a brief hiatus for the open night, the Shore Poets wildcard slot has now returned. If you want to read one of your poems at our May event, then bring one along with you and put your name into the wildcard hat when you pay at the door. One name will be drawn and open the evening with a poem!

We’ll also have live music from the Guerrilla String Quartet, and of course, our famous lemon cake raffle.